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2. Cuban Negrismo, Mexican Indigenismo: Contesting Neocolonialism in the New Negro Movement
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53 Cuban Negrismo, Mexican Indigenismo: Contesting Neocolonialism in the New Negro Movement DAVID LUIS-BROWN 2 Alain Locke’s foreword to the “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro” (1925) issue of Survey Graphic situates the “Negro Renaissance” among “nascent movements of folk-expression and self-determination” in countries like Mexico.1 Indeed, a year earlier, “Mexico: A Promise” appeared in the same journal. This earlier issue announces an exuberant “New Mexico” following the Mexican Revolution (1910–17). Contributors included the anthropologist Manuel Gamio, the artist Diego Rivera, President Plutarco Calles, and the Mexican secretary of education and essayist José Vasconcelos, best known for his manifesto on mestizaje (race mixing), La raza cósmica (The Cosmic Race, 1925). The white U.S. intellectuals Carleton Beals, a leftist journalist, and Katherine Anne Porter also contributed. This issue captures the postrevolutionary resurgence of pride in indigenous Mexico—Indigenismo—a time of cultural foment that an editorial compares to the “Italian renaissance.”2 It is likely, then, that “Mexico: A Promise” served as the model for Locke’s landmark New Negro issue. That possibility points toward the interrelations among three such movements in the Americas in the 1920s that called for a recognition of the rights and cultural achievements of blacks and indigenous groups: the New Negro movement, Cuban Negrismo, and Mexican Indigenismo.3 Many scholars now know that an interest in black diasporic vernacular expression, particularly the blues and the son, was common to Nicolás Guillén, a founder of Cuban Negrismo, and Langston Hughes, the leading poet of the New Negro movement. But few know that Cuba’s Revista de Avance (1927–30) published U.S. writers, including Hughes, Eugene O’Neill, and Countee Cullen.4 Even fewer have heard that intellectual currents also crossed between Mexico City and New York—as did the Mexican Miguel Covarrubias, whose illustrations adorned The Weary Blues (1926) by Hughes, Blues: An Anthology (1926) by W. C. Handy, and Mules and Men (1935) by Zora Neale Hurston.5 Such evidence of continuities among arts movements in Havana, 54 DAVID LUIS-BROWN Mexico City, Chicago, and New York provides merely a slice of their converging interests and multiple collaborations. A comparative and transnational approach to these 1920s nationalisms serves to unsettle their sedimented histories, allowing one to perceive their broader significance and shared political projects.6 Each of these three nationalisms featured primitivism, a cultural discourse that sought to explain racial identities and hierarchies as well as geopolitical inequalities by contrasting primitive and modern cultures to varying degrees. As early as the 1830s, romantic racialists in the United States, typically antislavery in their politics, argued that Negroes were a primitive people who were more highly endowed with emotions than with intellect and therefore were more religiously devout and artistic than white people.7 In 1918, the Chicago School sociologist Robert E. Park updated this tradition by arguing that the Negro was the “lady among the races,” linking blacks and women in their allegedly heightened emotionality .8 By the 1920s, primitivism was a fixture of popular culture common to social scientific, artistic, and literary discourses in Europe and the Americas, and artists and writers at every conceivable point on the political spectrum deployed the vocabularies of primitivism to address questions of race and empire. Although many have associated primitivism with a naive racial essentialism that simplified complex political dynamics by alternately celebrating or condemning the allegedly precivilized culture of the so-called darker races, its political meanings varied widely. Some used primitivism to try to rationalize existing racial hierarchies and the imperial might of the Jim Crow United States; others found themselves lured by primitivism into the traps of racial discourse; while still others deployed primitivism to criticize racial hierarchies and U.S. imperialism in the Americas. Protean in its uses, primitivism was perhaps the chief discursive commonality linking the nationalisms and transnationalisms of those whom W. E. B. Du Bois and others termed the “darker peoples” in the Americas. My hemispheric Americas approach to the New Negro movement, Cuban Negrismo, and Mexican Indigenismo reveals their common use of primitivist discourses, their shared institutional and discursive spaces, and the broad alliances that artists and writers constructed among the poor and racially oppressed.9 Conventional accounts of these interwar nationalisms have occluded their hemispheric ties. Moreover, up until recently, scholars such as Michael Fabre and Paul Gilroy have emphasized U.S.–European routes of black culture in the 1920s, while ignoring equally compelling trends in the Americas.10...